November 2003 Archives

I love this quote by "liquidthinking" in Making Sense of the Church about churches that embody the Gospel:

The gospel turns lives upside down. People quit their jobs in business and volunteer with homeless people. A church where the gospel is known is quirky, unpredictable, uncontrollable, uncool, seemingly unstable, and in every way alive. People are loved and the kingdom is built.

From Signposts:

I envisage a church in which everything will be tested by the principle: does it advance the cause of the kingdom of God? That is the only justification for a parish, hospital chaplaincy, industrial mission, a church welfare agency, a national church. Is the gospel being proclaimed? Is the faith of the people being deepened? Are lives being nourished and transformed? Are the downcast finding hope? Are human dignity and justice being furthered? Is God being glorified? These are the criteria by which we must restructure the church. (Keith Rayner)

A throw-away comment by Reggie McNeal in The Present Future that's got me thinking about planting churches and more:

As a side note, I wonder about our marketing efforts in selling the church rather than lifting up Jesus. It seems in the New Testament that Paul's strategy was to preach the gospel. He formed a church as a result of harvest. His goal was converts; the church was the natural by-product.

Dying Churches don't mount marketing campaigns for their saints.

My friend Joel posted this at hi splace and it made me think of Leading Dying Churches...

Shaving a Fluffy Bunny Saint

“Francis embodied and endorsed a very specific kind of poverty that only Christians of means could effectively embrace. Considered from this angle, Francis, whom we are accustomed to imagining as a ‘friend to the poor,’ comes across more like a Robin Hood in reverse, stealing the one spiritual advantage that the poor seemed to have—that is, their poverty—and giving it to the rich.”

Kenneth Wolf, The Poverty of Riches: St. Francis of Assisi Reconsidered

There are certain people who you don't just don't touch. Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, Mother Teresa, and St. Francis of Assisi are names that commonly fall from the lips of Christians -- Protestant and Catholic alike -- who you do not allow an ill word about to pass unchallenged. When I read Sarah Lamm's review of The Poverty of Riches: St. Francis of Assisi Reconsidered, a scholarly and critical work by Pomona College History professor Kenneth Baxter Wolf, two thoughts crossed my mind: "Uh-oh" and "It's about time".

It takes a special kind of courage to apply the razor's edge to a fluffy bunny saint after all. Think of all the times you have seen statues of Francis in someone's garden, on a wall, or in the name of a church. The word is out: you do not tarnish the legend of St. Francis of Assisi, you do not apply a depilatory to a man who gives most people the warm fuzzies.

But, from what I have read, Wolf is right: there are good reasons to question the saintliness of Francis. As Lamm points out: "Holy poverty....was voluntary poverty. Only the rich have the privilege of choosing to be poor."

In Wolf's judgement, Francis was as trendy as rich vegetarians and Arnold Schwartzenegger's charity. He wore the roughest fabrics he could find, not to live like the poor, but to outdo the poor in his suffering. "No truly poor person ever had to work this hard to earn the disdain of his community" says Wolf. Francis socialized with lepers, it is true, but nowhere is it recorded that he attempted to heal their disease or ease their suffering. He directly competed with beggars for alms: undoubtably, he was prettier than the stump-armed and foul-smelling derelicts who filled the streets of medieval Europe and could collect handsomer subsidies for his spiritual projects. It is true that he opposed war and bravely faced the Sultan, but what did he do on behalf of the victims of class warfare in Italy? Did he speak on their behalf? Did he publicize their plight? Did he set up hospitals and orphanages? The answer is resoundingly, "No".

For Francis, it was cool to be poor. He was more hippie (Cf. Brother Sun, Sister Moon) than Beat or Folkie. He did his celibate flower child routine and left the suffering and the destitute unaided, abandoned, ignored. When he got the big house he always wanted (a monastery) he retreated there and did nothing for the world of the poor.

While Francis himself professed a desire to be poor, he actually strove to be not-rich, which turns out to be something else altogether. As it turns out, the rich and poor of Assisi shared a common value; they all wanted to have money. After all, it’s nice to have.

Defenders of Francis will point to that passage of the Bible where Christ tells the rich young man to give up all his wealth if he means to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Wolf could counter this by pointing out that in the Sermon of the Mount, Christ says that when you make your good deeds public, they do not count towards redemption. We all know about St. Francis and the lepers, St. Francis and the Sultan, St. Francis and the wolf because St. Francis was an effective self-publicist. When we consider more modern saints such as Mother Teresa in this light, we are left to wonder: is there any reasonable path to saintliness through poverty?

I think so. If we combine the two dicta cited above, what we arrive at is poverty in anonymity. The saint does not receive recognition because the saint hides. He mingles with the poor, lives like the poor, does not attempt to stand out among them. He is just another one of the poor, susceptible to the same fluctuations of fortune as the best and the worst of them.

There, I've done it. I pulled the rough brown robe off your favorite saint and shown him butt-naked. Your inclination will undoubtably be to cover him up and accuse me of demonizing a good man. I counter with this: Francis of Assisi was a man of his times, not a conscious leech nor a fox, but a nice guy with an idea about spirituality which innocently departed from the path prescribed by Christ. He meant well as do the donors who give money in his name. Good intentions amount, however, to faith without meaningful works. If you mean to follow the teachings of Christ, you don't try to outdo the poor and draw attention to yourself when you give up your riches: you become like them fiscally, you chance fortune, and you accept oblivion.

The greatest saint since Christ is unknown to humankind. If there is an omniscient God, then we will find out just who that saint is when we die. She may be that bag lady or he may be a Latino "illegal alien" father who works three jobs to feed his family.

It behooves us to look past the robe and the versimilitude of hunger and see every human being as a Buddha struggling to be, to realize that behind a mask there may lurk a just lover of the Universe. Rebuke the rich. Champion the poor. Look in the eyes of everyone you see and see a possible Christ in them.

We shouldn't celebrate saints. We should try to live like one.

Exactly. Thanks, Joel, for pointing the way.

From Relevant Magazine:

For Hunter, the most serious issue facing the Church today is this total and complete misunderstanding of the Gospel itself. “I don’t believe the Gospel is about saying a prayer and then when you die you get to go to heaven. I think the true Gospel is about the in-breaking of the kingdom into your life today. So, yeah, I think that true revival can happen as people begin to realize what the real truth of the Gospel is all about. The Gospel is not, ‘Jesus paid the price for my sins so I go to heaven when I die,’ or at least it’s not the Gospel that Jesus announced. The Gospel that Jesus announced is the good news of the present availability of the kingdom through Him. When we only think of Jesus as an atoning sacrifice, then His life and teaching and modeling just totally go out the window. Discipleship then becomes optional,” Hunter argued. “But, if the Gospel is the good news that you can enter the kingdom and receive a different kind of life now, then you’ve got a basis for discipleship, or ‘follower-ship’...

Perhaps the greatest crisis in the Church today isn’t a lack of strong ministries; it’s the lack of strong Christians. “The way my friend Dallas Willard puts it, ‘What would happen if we shifted our focus from building bigger churches to building bigger Christians?’ and he means that seriously. What would be the evangelistic and cultural implications of that?”

It's bothered me for some time that we ask questions of people ("Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Savior?") that Jesus never asked. Jesus did say, "Follow me." That's a much better invitation.

From Fast Company's First Impression:

"Organizations that are run by heroes hit barriers." (Timothy Butler, Director, Harvard Business School Career Center)

How true. It's freeing to move beyond acting (or pretending) that the pastor is a hero with the answers and charisma to move the church forward. It's a little sad that it's taken Jim Collins and Enron for a lot of us (including me) to catch on to this.

I'm finding a lot of good stuff today, including this quote through Living Room:

The image of much contemporary christianity could be summarized as holy people coming regularly to a holy place on a holy day at a holy hour to participate in a holy ritual led by a holy man dressed in holy clothes for a holy fee. Since this regular performance-oriented enterprise called 'worship service' requires a lot of organizational talent and administrative bureaucracy, formalized and institutionalized patterns developed quickly into rigid traditions. Statistically, a traditional one or two hour 'worship service' is very resource hungry but produces very little fruit in terms of discipling people, i.e. in changing their lives. Economically, it is a 'high input, low output' structure. Traditionally, the desire to worship 'in the right way' has led to much deominationalism, confessionalism and nominalism. This not only ignores the fact that Christians are called to worship 'in spirit and in truth', rather than in cathedrals holding songbooks. It also ignores the fact that most of life is informal, and so too is Christianity as 'the Way of Life'. Do we need to change from being powerful actors and start acting powerfully? (Wolfgang Simson, Houses that Change the World )

Just added the book to my list.

Found through Mike Todd, a statement from an interview with Pete Rollins:

Be cynical. The original cynics where a dusty group of people who questioned ethics not because they hated ethics but because they loved ethics so much. They questioned God and religion not because they where sceptical but because they where obsessed with God and religion. Questioning God is not questioning God, but only questioning 'God' - in other words our understanding of God. In the same way that Marxism helped liberation theology to find a voice so deconstruction (which is very cynical) will help revolutionise Western Christianity.

Bill Easum writes in Unfreezing Moves:

Growth, health, and the life cycles of institutions are not the basic issues facing Christian congregations at the beginning of this millennium. The basic issue facing your congregation is: Are you faithful? Congregations can be healthy and growing but not faithful. Some congregations grow simply because of their location and often in spite of their best efforts to support the status quo. Many congregations, which function as a family chapel, are healthy family systems with absolutely no desire to join Jesus on the mission field. These congregations are not faithful.

I realize that some writers use the terms health and vitality somewhat in the same way that I use the term faithfulness. However, too much of the writing and conversation today focuses on institutional health, which is not what I mean by the word faithfulness.

Faithful congregations follow Jesus into the mission field to make disciples who make a difference in their world.

This was the kick in the pants I received a year ago that began the process of thinking beyond church health or institutional survival. It's still one of the best quotes about why we need to think beyond our own church's institutional survival. That's not the point. Following Jesus into the mission field, even at the expense of our institutional survival, is the point.

To follow Jesus is to first of all follow Him into the presence of the Holy Father, casting ourselves at His feet, acknowledging our natural sinfulness and that Christ died on the cross to put that self to death; acknowledging our fear and weakness, calling on Him to renew our minds so we can be persuaded that on the cross our old self was rendered powerless, calling on Him to neutralize the power of Satan who blinds us to this truth, calling on Him to open our eyes to see ourselves properly, both the lies with which Satan has held us captive and who we have been made in Him, to speak to us clearly to impress the Divine "musts" of Scripture, to clarify our specific obedience and finally to grant us even a glimpse of His glory that would permanently change our value system so that we can rise from His presence denying ourselves, take up our cross and follow Jesus into a broken world, to take the kingdom of God to those who cross our paths, and to do this daily. (anonymous)

I'm really enjoying The Present Future. Here, briefly, are some of the assumptions that Reggie McNeal challenges:

If you build the perfect church (the way we think about church), they will come.

Growing your church will automatically make a difference in the community.

Developing better church members will result in greater evangelism.

The church needs more members (for church work).

Church involvement results in discipleship.

Better planning will get you where you want to go (in terms of missional effectiveness).

There are lots of good insights in this book. McNeal also presents six shifts that we need to take that correspond to the above points: shifting from church growth to kingdom growth, from planning to preparation, etc.

This is sometimes a challenging book, but well worth the read.

Critiquing the status quo is a lot easier than trying to plant and pastor a different kind of church and change the status quo. (Brian McLaren, The Church in Emerging Culture)

It's time for a confession. It's been obvious for a while, but I might as well admit it. I don't have a clue what I'm doing.

It's true. I'm not exaggerating (not much, anyway). I remind myself of a bachelor who professes to have no interest in getting married while he gets ready for a date.

One minute, I post that I'm accepted into a Doctor of Ministry program on preaching. The next minute, I wonder out loud if preaching has any place within the worship service of a church. One minute, I talk about leading dying churches. The next minute, I'm collecting a paycheck from a church that hasn't yet died. What gives?

To use another metaphor, I sometimes feel like I've got one foot in the saddle of a horse that's about to keel over, and another foot in the saddle of a horse that's just getting started. The only problem is, I don't know where the second horse is going. But at some point, I've got to choose: go with the one that's dying or not? The answer's pretty obvious, but I still find myself with one foot in the saddle of something that sure looks like it's dying. (By this, I mean the North American church.)

My only consolation is that I'm not the only one. God is raising up people all over the world who are sick of the church the way it is and won't take it anymore. We're trying to figure it out, but it's not like somebody's left us a map.

It's going to be an interesting journey.

From Future Margins:

Think of the church as a building and it becomes building centered and architecture dependent.

Think of the church as an organization, and it becomes preoccupied with organizational forms and programs.

Think of the church organically, and it focuses on what makes for healthy life.

I got this e-mail from a friend today, who attended the Extraordinary Women simulcast with CCN this past Saturday:

John Tesh was leading some worship songs. He talked about going to Africa for a special 5 day gathering of praise and prayer for the people involved in 9/11.

After about day 3, he asked one of the organizers what was going on because the worship was so incredible.

He asked something like, "Do you have great pastors, etc.?". The organizer told him basically that "here in Africa, it's not about the pastor or about the (whatever), it's about the Christ."

Sounds like something the dying church should aspire to say.